Storage Software Market Nears $3.5B in Q3

Posted on December 11, 2013 By Pedro Hernandez

Storage software sales crept up 1.5 percent in the third quarter of 2013, on a year-over-year basis, helping the industry reach $3.47 billion in revenues, according to IDC, a market research firm.

Vendors have growing demand for data protection solutions, in part, to thank for the modest increase. IDC research analyst Jingwen Li said in a statement, "Data protection & recovery software and storage & device management software were the two major sources of growth this quarter."

As a category, data replication didn't fare as well. However, the software still found its way to customers. Li stated that "investments in storage replication software have fallen throughout the year as suppliers have increasingly bundled this capability within larger competitive deals."

"Storage Replication software sales declined -3.6% year over year to $660 million," said IDC.

Reflecting EMC's lead in the enterprise storage hardware space, the company also claimed the top spot in the storage software market by generating 25.2 percent of revenues during the quarter. The company's software suite includes its virtualization-aware Avamar backup and recovery product.

EMC has also been busy growing its software portfolio. The storage giant snapped up ScaleIO, a virtual SAN software startup, in a deal reportedly worth up to $300 million. ScaleIO's ECS (Elastic Converged Storage) technology targets the burgeoning market for software that pools server-side storage to provide SAN-like capabilities.

"ECS makes storage as inconspicuous as CPU and RAM. Running seamlessly alongside business applications, ECS enables data centers to be built wall to wall from commodity servers only," said ScaleIO CEO Boaz Palgi when his company emerged from stealth last year.